


The Creeping Darkness

by SaltyRobotFriend



Series: DND character origins [2]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Gen, I accidentally wrote 2600 words worth of origin story for one of my PCs, I almost named this after an MST3K movie but I have 'restraint', I grew up during the Mary Sue Scare of the early aughts so like, Oh yeah shoutout to my dndiscord for saying I'm allowd to write fic of my ocs, Origin Stories, also I probably fucked up how Warlocks interact with holy ground but whatever, becasue that would be fair, it's litterally just 2600 words of a lady getting harrassed by an eldergod, now I gotta write stuff for my other two, this is how her origin story happened, warlock origin story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-02 15:09:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15799065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaltyRobotFriend/pseuds/SaltyRobotFriend
Summary: An archeologist narrowly escapes freezing to death in Antarctica but she's pretty fucking far from being out of the woods.





	The Creeping Darkness

**Author's Note:**

> I'm just really happy I get to play dnd finally, OK

Elé woke up in the warm darkness of a quiet tent, her body aching much more than a hike through an ancient city would warrant. Her ears were greeted by the breeze softly rustling the tent, she breathed clean air, and she became aware of a heavy blanket on top of her and a bedroll under her back. She looked around, dazed, utterly confused about how she got there. Her near-sighted eyes could not pull the dark shapes around her into focus.

“Hello?” she said in elvish, her first language, and she winced at the rawness of her throat, like she’d been screaming for hours on end. She rolled over onto her side and groped around for her glasses but didn't find them. “Anyone there?” she croaked a bit louder, to the chagrin of her own larynx. She was answered by footsteps followed by a humanoid shape entering the tent. She flinched at the moonlight that glinted off of their horns.

“You’re awake, finally,” the teifling said in common. They sat down next to Elé and pressed her glasses into her hand, which were now coated with frost and almost hurt to touch. She unfolded and put them on slowly.

“Where am I?” she asked in the same language. The teifling had set down their violin to the side.

“Still on the glacier, a day’s walk from town. My name’s Tiff by the way.”

“Elé Dumont, PHD. Was I...” She was still trying to get her mind rolling. It felt as wrung out and tired as the rest of her body.

“You were kind of—sleepwalking when you came across our camp. You’ve been unresponsive the whole day. Where exactly did you come from?”

She answered slowly, “I came from those ruins about, three days south of town.” He looked at her like she had just crawled out of a haunted polluted bog.

“ _Those_ ruins? That old city way out there in the mountains?.”

“I’m an archaeologist,” she said, expecting that to be enough of an explanation, but they still looked discombobulated.

“Do you remember what happened out there?” they asked in a hushed tone. Elé tried to. She tried to think of what happened but any concrete memory of what happened was dashed by the damned flashing lights and whispers. She tried to retrace her steps from the abandoned streets and skyscrapers unlike anything seen on earth, many of which looked like they grew on their own in defiance of gravity and collapsed once the laws of physics suddenly applied again, down into the catacombs lined with luminescent stones and murals depicting creatures that looked too physiologically impossible to have been real. As she walked through the tunnel the smell of frost and rot became unbearable, but she kept going, knowing she was onto something. And after that it was just noise, and the feeling of her own mind getting mashed up and twisted by someone else’s hands. She told Tiff as much.

“You think it was a Mind Flayer?” they asked, their tone suspicious. Elé shook her head. She just didn’t know. She drew the blanket tighter around herself as much for its grounding weight as for warmth.

“Where’s my canteen?” she asked. She looked around and saw her backpack at the foot of her bedroll. Tiff retrieved her canteen for her and she took a long, restorative drink.

“It’s pretty late,” said Tiff, waxing their knuckles nervously. “Get some sleep if you can, we can take you back to town tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” she muttered. “Thank you so much.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just take it easy, you’re gonna be alright.”

Elé laid back down, exhausted, and drifted off, nothing on her mind but darkness.

✧*:･ﾟ✧

Glacierpoint was closer to an outpost than a town. The harbor and shipyard were its biggest features, and while there may have been some permanent homes hidden in the buildings somewhere the small hotels and temples were the closest thing to a house that could be seen. The largest building was a checkpoint for explorers and scientists like Elé. There was a circle that stretched for a mile around town where there was a lot less snow on the ground, and when Elé and her benefactors crossed the threshold the air became considerably warmer, though it was still cold.

Elé was dropped off at the Temple of Celestian. She crossed the threshold easily, no demonic being she might’ve picked up in the ruins screamed when entering holy ground, and the acolytes that looked her over healed some psychic damage but didn’t find anything off about her.

“Do you think something might’ve latched onto you down there?” asked the dwarf acolyte who had healed her.

“I just know what I told you,” Elé replied. “I don’t remember what specifically was down there, just sensory input. Have you seen anything like the—creatures? Sorry I couldn’t describe them very well, but, really I didn’t know what I was looking at.”

“I’ve never heard of those,” the acolyte said, shrugging. “Are you going to be alright? We have a few rooms available here, you can stay here until the next boat to the north if you can’t stay in a hotel.”

“I don’t—I want to stay in the temple. Something’s off. It’s ineffable but something’s wrong.”

“No worries.” The acolyte helped Elé to her feet. She wasn’t as unsteady as she had been the day before and didn’t have a problem climbing the stairs to her room. The acolyte left her in a small room with a narrow, but soft bed set with plush sheets. She dropped her backpack, coat and scarf by the desk next to the bed. The walls were insulated by thick tapestries and pierced by narrow slit windows. She sat down and pulled her pen and paper from her bag.

_Dear Orinda,_

_I made it through another expedition. I’ll tell you what, This was just about the strangest experience I’ve had since I started doing this stuff years ago…_

She recounted the events that lead her to the temple in her letter. As she did something pressed from the back of her mind, something that drove her into a cold panic. She could almost perceive the shape of it, but it was so massive and there was so much of it. Her body felt out of control and weightless. She put her head down on the desk and took deep breaths. The toasty air spiked with stained wood and wet ink reminded her where she was. The panic soon passed and she was once again a tired elf slumped against a desk with a pen in her hand. The last sentence she wrote had become illegible.

When she did finish the letter she went downstairs and dropped it off in an outgoing mailbox in the foyer. Elé crashed into bed the second she was back upstairs, only just awake enough to take off her boots and glasses before folding herself up in the blankets and going to sleep.

And then another wave of panic pulled her out of a deep sleep. Tendrils reached out to her at the edges of her vision where she could barely see them, and like a riptide pulling her under she was being pulled back into sleep where this Thing was, her racing heart and the ice in her veins the only thing keeping her awake. Something was surrounding and closing in on her. When she did wake up, there was a human acolyte hanging over her, saying she heard screaming. Elé’s head was pounding and she was seconds away from throwing up.

When she was alone again she paced around the small space to regain her bearings. She looked around, only seeing the tapestries and the snow outside the window. She sat down in the chair when she got tired and tried to meditate. For a nice, peaceful second everything was quiet.

But she was suddenly yanked out of her own body and into a cold, crushing abyss. She heard thousands of voices whispering, or whimpering, as she was pulled under the sea. A dark cold energy grasped at her as she tried to pull herself out of her trance. Finally, she somehow snapped herself back to consciousness, or whatever was holding onto her mind let her go, and she sat alone in her dark room again wide-eyed and gasping for air. She shivered in her seat, every bit as cold in here as it was out there. She grabbed the blanket from her bed and sat up in her chair, wrapped in the blanket, not letting herself fall back into a trance.

The next morning Elé descended the stairs unsteadily. She found the acolyte from the day before and asked if she could see a cleric.

“Are you—you don’t look good,” said the dwarf.

“I couldn’t sleep,” said Elé, “I was having, hallucinations or something. I’ve never had them before, my family hasn’t—I don’t know what the deal is.”

“Alright, alright. We’ll get to the root of the problem. Come with me,” the acolyte extended her hand, “I’ll have to find him but I can take you to his office. They’re might be a bit of a wait.”

So Elé waited, coming close to but refusing to fall asleep in the high backed chair in front of a desk. She fidgeted and rocked back and forth to stay awake. The office was brightly lit by a chandelier of seven stars, imitating Celestian’s symbol, making the many metallic gold stars that decorated the dark blue walls twinkle as if they were hanging in the night sky. The scented candles on the shelf were all lit as well, leaving no crevice in the dark.

It was small though. The walls were as close to Elé as they were in the catacombs. But this place was cozy, cluttered even. There was activity here. There was an organized chaos to the books and stacks of paper everywhere. It felt lived in. Take away all the stars and she would’ve mistaken it for her professors room back at the University of Pennsylvania, or her own dorm room when her and Orinda were pulling all nighters during finals week.

But it was also silent in here. The grandfather clock ticked behind her but it was almost swallowed by the quiet and stillness of the room. There wasn’t even a phonograph in the room she could switch on and ask for permission after it’s owner came in.

The clock ticked and tocked on the wall. Elé took deep breaths in beat with the clock and pressed herself into the chair. As the minutes crawled passed the anxiety was creeping back in, the feeling that someone was watching her even though she was certain she was alone.

She blinked. The lights flickered. Her eyes darted around all the lights set around the room. Nothing. The lights flickered again. Her adrenaline spiked. She shut her eyes and put her face in her hands. She felt the walls closing in on her. She opened her eyes again and everything was normal, there was no reason for her to start feeling cold again, or like she was being sucked down into the depths of the sea.

Darkness flickered in her eyes.

And shadows grew from the corners, overpowering the light. Elé choked on the smell of seawater, and then she could’ve sworn she was inhaling some. The shadows twisted in out of the corner of her eyes, seizing her in its writhing tendrils. She searched for the stars and candles and books in the room but the darkness was taking over. She tried to call for help but she was drowning.

And then, out of nowhere, even though she was still drowning, even though the shadows still held her in a tight grip, a wave of calm washed over her, and in her moment of lucidity she realized it didn’t come from her. Through the shadows she barely saw the shape of a man, the sound of a prayer came at her as if from a great distance. There was a soft hand on her forehead. Whatever had her wasn’t paying any mind to whatever the cleric was doing, and from what Elé could hear he was struggling to work his divine magic against it.

It was talking to her.

Elé closed her eyes and forcefully pulled her thoughts together. She couldn’t be underwater if there was a guy saying prayers right next to her. She could feel a plush carpet—she had collapsed to the floor. She somehow forced her lungs to open up and pull in air. The cleric’s voice was too far away and the Thing was too loud for her to hear anything else but she focused on the prayers anyway. She opened her eyes, searched for the cleric and the blurred lights in the room.

And then it was over. The whispers abruptly stopped and the shadows slithered out of her vision and off of her body. She groped at her face and on the floor around her trying to locate her glasses. They were placed in her hand and she shoved them back onto her face. Her eyes darted around the once again normal office and regained her bearings.

“Are you alright?” the Cleric asked as he helped Elé sit up.

“Did you see any of that?” Elé demanded instead of answering, still panting.

“I didn’t _see_ it, but-” he looked discombobulated, “I don’t know what that was.”

“You don’t? But, you did—detect someth-”

“What did you do?”

Elé was too shocked to respond to that. She sat there, mouth agape, and then managed to sputter out, “I don’t kn—I didn’t do anything!”

The cleric scrutinized her. She could tell he wasn’t sure what to make of what she said, but she was telling the truth, as far as she knew, anyway.

“Elé, right?” he asked. She nodded dumbly. His gaze was hard and suspicious. “This isn’t—nothing’s possessing you. I tried to exorcise it or just shield you from it, but, it’s stuck to you. You were at the ruins three days from here before you came here, right?” She nodded again, starting to piece together what might have happened, though try as she might she couldn’t remember it happening. “Something’s—you’ve bound yourself to something.”

“But I didn’t do anything!” she insisted. “I didn’t—I don’t know what happened!”

“Amber told me you didn’t remember what happened in the ruins. I’m not accusing you of anything, but you’re now tied to something way bigger than I can deal with.”

Elé kept shaking her head. “You can’t…?” she asked, choking back tears.

“I don’t know what you’ve gotten into. All I can tell you is try to get some sleep and get on the first boat out of here tomorrow.”

“Wh—Then what?” she stammered. The cleric just shook his head and helped her to her feet. “It won’t let me sleep, or trance or anything it won’t leave me alone.”

“I’m sorry, Elé,” was all he said as he guided her to the stairs.

✧*:･ﾟ✧

Elé slumped over her desk as much paralyzed by fear as she was tired. It was quieter now, anyway. She couldn’t focus on the book she set in front of her. She couldn’t distract herself with it if she couldn’t focus on anything. It ultimately became a pillow as she collapsed onto it. For a while she was alone in there, and everything was nice and quiet. She almost fell asleep too, but was shocked back into consciousness when It whispered to her again. Its language was incomprehensible to any mortal ears but she instinctively knew what It said.

It wasn’t going to let her go.


End file.
